Katie Hughes is currently working at Clair Global and participating in Clair Global’s Road Staff in Training Program. She will be reporting on her experience with the program over the next several weeks.
By: Katie Hughes
10/23/14
I started working in the warehouse here at CLAIR in June as the touring season was starting to pick up. I helped with tour prep, looming and labeling cables, making snakes, testing gear, and loading and unloading trucks. During this time, I also got to experience many days of field training. Gradually more and more of the people new to the Road Staff in Training program started working in the warehouse as well, and in October, we were to finally start class.
There are seven people in my class, and there’s even another woman. They are from all over the United States.
As people skills are very important in this industry, we started the first few days of class talking a lot about social skills and effective communication. Our job consists mainly of communicating with other people whether you are mixing monitors and working directly with the band, mixing the show for the crowd that came to see it, or communicating with the rest of the audio crew to make sure everything goes together smoothly.
We then jumped right into some safety and rigging fundamentals and discussed how crucial it is to be aware of what you are doing. We went over safety basics and looked at some rigging safety policies in the industry.
10/27/15
Our next topic in class has been power and electricity. We started at the fundamentals of AC, defined what Ohm’s Law is and how electricity and magnetism work. We spent a few days talking about; transformers, testing and troubleshooting power, different power requirements in different countries, cable gauge ratings, and the importance of grounding.
We work here at the shop full time. We spend half of the day in the classroom and the other half rotating between different departments in the warehouse. This first month, I have been working in the microphone room. In here we help get microphones, stands, and work boxes together for each tour that goes out. We go through and make sure the work boxes all are fully stocked with things like tools, adapter cables, tape, and sharpies. My favorite part about working in here was getting to spend some time testing microphones that had come back from the road. There are not many times when you have access to that many different types of microphones at once. I had to plug each one of them in, listen to it, and make sure everything was working fine. When you listen to just your own voice on so many of them, you can really start to get a feel for how each microphone sounds compared to others.
11/6/15
We had a test on power last week and we all did very well. We have moved onto a new topic in class. This week we are going over line array theory and different types of line array systems. We talked about the purpose of a line array and went over factors that can change its behavior or response, such as; design of the enclosure, component design and placement, length of array, shape of array, and the atmosphere that it is in. Clair manufactures their speakers in house, so we learned some specifics about those boxes.
This month I have been working in the cable-manufacturing department. In this room, they build cables and components for everything that is built here at the shop. This job takes a lot of patience and time. I have been working on repairing cables that have been damaged out on the road and have gotten a lot of soldering practice in. I now have a new appreciation for taking care of the gear while you are out at the gig.
11/20/15
We have spent the past few weeks out of the classroom learning how to fly and rig different types of PA that Clair uses/manufacturers. We discussed the process of what needs to happen when putting speakers in the air and revisited some of the rigging and safety topics we had talked about a few weeks previously. We got to use all different kinds of speakers and learn different ways that it can be done. There really is a lot to think about and remember when you are flying the PA such as cable lengths, pinning angles, motors, plugging the boxes in, and not pinching fingers! It is really helpful to have a routine down so that you don’t forget to do anything before the array is out of your reach.
